Increasing migration within Europe calls for education systems to be prepared to address the needs of newly arrived migrant students. When arriving to a new country, students face the expectations of learning a new language and adapting to a new cultural and educational environment, while simultaneously dealing with complex emotional issues and separation from their previous life (Björklund, 2015; Ojha et al., 2024). The challenges can be specifically intense for students migrating as teenagers who are also going through the age-related processes and emotional turbulence (Crosnoe and Johnson 2011). While migrant students constitute a heterogeneous group characterised by diverse identities and experiences (Conti, 2025), many of them share the challenges of, for example, linguistic barriers, lack of sense of belonging, and forming friendships with their non-migrant peers (e.g. Kaukko et al., 2022; OECD, 2023). Supporting new arrivals’ learning and integration requires school culture and guidelines that promote cultural and language awareness and social justice (Hajisoteriou et al., 2018; Manninen et al., 2022). Moreover, previous research has established that social networks, such as teacher and peer relationships, have an important role in helping the students to overcome their challenges and feel more included in the school community (Bešic et al., 2020; Bogossian, 2025; for an overview of research on relationship building in European schools, see Romey et al., 2025).

This study examines newly arrived migrant students’ depictions of networks they found meaningful when transitioning from preparatory education to basic education in Finland. In the Finnish education system, new arrivals usually attend preparatory education classes for a year before fully transitioning to basic education with other students (Venäläinen et al., 2022). While in preparatory education all students have arrived recently and share the experience of adapting to a new place and learning a new language, after transitioning the students are placed among their peers in basic education and some of the initial support is left behind. It is important to examine the challenges and needs that students experience during this transition phase, as well as the factors that enable a successful transition from preparatory education to basic education. However, for the time being, research on the transition phase remains scarce. Moreover, previous research on migrant students’ experiences has largely focused on challenges, and apart from some exceptions (e.g. Björklund, 2015; Bogossian, 2025), the examination of successful experiences and practices has remained limited. This study aims at responding to these gaps by focusing on newly arrived migrant students’ experiences on what has been helpful for them during the transition. The study addresses this issue by focusing on how newly arrived migrant students have found various social networks (peer relationships, home-school relationship, teacher-student relationship, leisure time relationships) supportive in learning and fostering a sense of belonging.

The research questions are as follows:

1)      How do newly arrived migrant students narrate the social networks that they consider meaningful during their transition from preparatory education to basic education?

2)      How do the students portray the ways in which their social networks support their learning and sense of belonging?

This study is part of a mixed-method research project Pathways (funded by Research Council of Finland, 2025-2029) that focuses on newly arrived migrant students’ trajectories during and after transitioning from preparatory education to basic education or upper secondary education. The aim of the research project is to observe what kind of conditions and networks may support new arrivals in integrating into the society. As a follow-up to an earlier longitudinal, mixed-method research project VOITTO (funded by the Ministry of Education and Culture, 2023-2025), Pathways builds upon previously collected data and follows certain participants of the earlier research project.

This study adopts a qualitative research design that focuses on the perspectives of 30 newly arrived migrant students (aged 15–17). All students have also participated in our earlier research project VOITTO. The students have previously been attending preparatory education and have since transitioned to basic education. The data consists of ecomaps drawn by and interviews with the students. In the ecomaps the students write down family members, friends, and authorities they have considered meaningful and important for them during the time of preparatory education and the following transition to basic education. The ecomaps are further discussed with each participant in individual semi-structured interviews, where they elaborate how the different networks have supported them during their educational and social pathways. In the interviews the discussions focus on the students’ learning, sense of belonging and social relations. In the interviews both the researcher and the students are understood as participating in the construction of meaning and narrative (Mishler, 1986). The data are analysed using a narrative analysis method (Mishler, 1986; Polkinghorne, 1995). Narrative analysis enables an examination of how students make sense of their experiences and how their stories are shaped by the social, cultural and institutional contexts in which they are told. Our aim is to develop explanatory narratives from the interview data (Polkinghorne, 1995) that illustrate both individual trajectories and shared patterns across the participants’ accounts. Narrative analysis allows us to attend to students’ lived experiences while situating them within the broader school community and its relational networks. The ecomaps and interviews are analysed at two analytical levels. First, each interview and ecomap is examined as an individual narrative, enabling a detailed exploration of participants’ specific situations, identities, and meaning-making processes. Second, the data are analysed across interviews to identify narrative patterns, recurrent themes and shared storylines. This dual-level approach aligns with recent work emphasising narrative practices, identity navigation and positioning in storytelling (Bamberg, 2020). After an initial familiarisation with the dataset, the transcripts are segmented into narrative units to construct core narratives both within individual cases and across the dataset, reflecting contemporary applications of narrative analysis in qualitative research (e.g. Lima & Ristum, 2025). As the analysis is still ongoing, the final results are under development.

As a result of the analysis the interviews and ecomaps will paint a picture of newly arrived migrant students’ narratives of supportive social networks during preparatory education and the transition to basic education. They will describe who the students have considered helpful and what kind of support has helped them thrive socially and academically. The stories can be evident both at the level of individual interviews and across the entire data set. Preliminary findings indicate that peer relationships and student-teacher relationship have been particularly meaningful for the students. This study can contribute to better understanding the ways in which newly arrived migrant students could be supported in their integration into the school community and further into society. It enables migrant youth to describe the people, environments, and support measures they find meaningful. Moreover, the stories may provide further insights into how newly arrived migrant students form new relationships and maintain relationships with people from their home countries. The study can shed light on how the organisational cultures, guidelines, and practices in schools could be developed to better address the needs of newly arrived migrant students in relation to learning and sense of belonging.

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